Onan overcast April day in the middle of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, Paul Lwin looks like he’s playing a vintage video game. He huddles over a laptop on the deck of the spartan vessel he’s taking out on the water today. Tiny boat icons float across the screen; he draws a box around them, selects a few parameters, and clicks “Start Play.” Seconds later, a set of driverless boats in the bay a mile away begin gliding in parallel with the icons, which leave bright blue tracks on the screen in their wake. Lwin flashes an enormous grin. Each of those autonomous crafts is a “Rampage,” the 14-foot flagship boat of Lwin’s Providence-based company, Havoc, which outfits its vessels with technology that theoretically lets a single human control thousands at once. Lwin, 40, and his cofounder Joe Turner, 42, both Navy vets, aim to become the U.S. military’s go-to maker of specialized software for not just uncrewed boats, but all domains, after recently acquiring a couple of small aerial and land drone startups as well. “The goal here is to make sure you don’t need to know anything about robotics or autonomy,” Lwin explains, showing the steps again on the laptop. “If it’s not this simple, it’s a science experiment. Operators—especially warfighters who don’t have PhDs in robotics, who don’t have PhDs in search algorithms—will never use it if it’s more difficult than this.” By Monica Hunter-Hart, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices